In general people don't tend to (need to) escape from the Tidal DSL into the rest of Haskell, and stateful operations like cellular automata doesn't sit well with Tidal's focus on stateless pattern combinations and transformation.
That said there is now a way to create stateful events, as a useable working prototype. I'd love to see that pushed further.
Furthermore recently I've been thinking about replacing the mini-notation with proper Haskell with a distinct type for rhythms for Tidal v2.0. Then rhythms and patterns could be embedded in each other and stateful algorithmic composition on sequences would become more idiomatic to Tidal.
and a +1 on looking into what Clarissa is up to!